The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

Dave, Ed quits three times a week

Whoops. The disk on lsc.nd.edu filled up today, causing all manner of Badness.

The web logs hadn't been archived in quite a while, and they just filled up all space. So I moved them out to AFS and downloaded them to my laptop. Pure-text compression is amazing -- downloaded 99MB across my DSL in 2:35, and 395MB in 7:26.

bzip2'ed down, it's less than 20MB.

Woof.

My DSL modem periodically (and randomly) freezes up. The only way to fix it is to power cycle it. I think I've mentioned this in previous journal entries.

This is somewhat annoying as it only tends to happen when I am away from home and need to access my machines remotely. I am therefore unable to power cycle my modem, and life sucks.

I got a UPS to see if I could alleviate this problem -- thinking that it was perhaps due to dirty power.

Apparently, it's not. The modem froze yesterday as well. :-(

I finally decided to call my DSL ISP (DirectTVDSL) and ask about this. Their solution: move the DSL modem physically 3 feet away from any other electrical device.

Sounds kinda sketchy, but I'll give it a whirl, I guess...

We got a new phone book today.

Progress is actually being made on OSCAR documentation. I spent too much time the other day tex-izing the installation document for 1.1. Tom from ORNL tex-ized the "introduction" doc. And Jim from LLNL and Mike from ORNL/Wisconsin both just got write access to the OSCAR repository to write to the 2.x architecture document. Woo hoo!

We've rolled a whole bunch of LAM patches into a CVS branch for LAM 6.5, and are gearing up for a 6.5.5 release. After a few minor glitches, the testing seems to be going well.

ND's IRIX machine seems to have locked up, though. The last load factor that I saw from uptime was 38 -- I think someone is DOS'ing the machine. My session is now hung; I can initiate new ssh sessions, and they connect, but then nothing happens. <sigh>

Our neighbors are moving.

Perhaps I need to take more showers.

Jeremy has started a journal. It has my favorite picture of him on it, too -- the Blair Witch Jeremy ("I'm so sorry...").

Helped a friend order a new Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop (similar to mine). It finally came yesterday, and I spent a little time last night setting it up. Nice machine.

It came with w2k and office XP (although she ordered office 2k --
had to call customer support and get them to send office 2k CDs). Interestingly enough, it came with speech-to-text software as well. We played with it a little, and it was surprisingly accurate with no training.

I said, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" and it just magically appeared in Word. Kewl.

On the flip side of w2k, though, I've been trying to figure out how to do peer-to-peer shares efficiently at my church. They have various file-sharing needs, and currently do it in a mish-mash manner (everyone shares some set of specific folders to everyone else).

Among other reasons why this is bad, there's no file protection in this model because most of the machines are w98. There's a small number of w2k machines in the office, and I set about consolidating all the shares onto a single w2k machine so that I could have proper file permissions.

The only problem was -- I couldn't seem to set file permissions on the w2k box! It took me a long time to figure this out, but apparently Gateway shipped the w2k machine with FAT32 as the filesystem instead of NTFS. Permissions and quotas and whatnot require NTFS.

Arrrgghghhh!!!

Helpful Johnny found a conversion tool (convert.exe) that converts from FAT32 to NTFS (I found it very amusing that a Windoze guy I know said "you can't do that"). This should fix my problems...